On Sunday, January 7, 2007, I went to church with my parents here in St. Louis to hear the new pastor of their church preach his first sermon there. I even made an entry here about it, saying that it was "a longish sermon." Well, now it's two years later, the same guy is still manning the pulpit, and I went with my parents to hear him today. The church service began at 10:15. It ended a minute or two short of noon. The pastor started preaching at 10:50. He is beginning a study of the letter to the Romans, and today he covered the first six verses. He ended his sermon at 11:52. The sermon was the longest I have ever heard--sixty-two minutes on six introductory verses. I took a peek at the rest of the congregation at about the forty-minute mark when we were just about reaching the backstretch, and it didn't look as if they were exactly riveted by his efforts. But how spellbinding would a sermon of that length have to be to hold hundreds of people's attention? Bored looks aplenty. Three people got up at various times and left--going out the back doors to the parking lot, not out the side doors to a bathroom. The pastor had some good points--about fifteen minutes of good content buried away in the bloat. Of course, a short sermon can be boring just as an incredibly long one can, but after today it sure seems that the long ones have some built-in challenges of avoiding boredom than the short ones lack.

It made me think that maybe there should be some quality control on preachers, besides the obvious one of people leaving the church for other churches (which is what's also happening here; the church has downsized by about a third in two years). Teachers have their student evaluations, schools and hospitals their accreditation boards, other professions have supervisory assessments. Do pastors feel themselves above such assessment by the people paying their salaries? Do they feel that they report only to God? Any why wouldn't God want them to be cogent? When someone at this church mentions that the sermons could be a bit more distilled in their wisdom, the pastor just shrugs off the comment under the reply that he is called to the ministry by God, which evidently excuses these meandering, self-indulgent, anecdote-filled spiels (for example, ten minutes today on NASCAR, a sport that he finds entertaining but that his wife describes as "three hours of making a left turn").

What's worse is that he can look around the room and see the same inattentiveness that I saw but is apparently not bothered by it. Bored people in the pews he evidently blames on the bored people, rather than seeing glazed faces as a challenge to himself to make his comments more absorbing. Everyone who speaks to rooms of people for a living has bored some of the people some of the time, myself included. The best comment I heard at an in-service over the past two or three years was the observation that when a teacher looks out over the class and sees signs of boredom, before blaming the students, the teacher should first ask what he/she is doing to make the material interesting and do more.

And then of course, there's P.G. Wodehouse's classic short story "The Great Sermon Handicap." I thought of that today. Bertie Wooster hears from two cousins about a sure-fire way to make some money: come to the country where his two relatives have set up a weekly betting pool based on the length of the local preachers' sermons. They are handicapping the local parsons and setting the odds. Bertie knows of a chap who has a sermon on brotherly love that lasts forty-five minutes if it lasts a second. He thinks he has a sure winner. But I know someone who could beat that.

Here's what I did, prank-wise, referred to below:

1) In grad school, I had an apartment right below a sports anchor who listened to games with the volume turned way up. I could hear every word of the announcers coming through the ceiling. After weeks of this, I finally went out to the mailboxes and got him name, then looked him up in the phone book. One Saturday when he had the volume up way, way high, I called him. I could hear the phone ringing upstairs through the ceiling. I could hear him walking over to turn down the radio. I could hear him walking over to the phone. Right when he got to the phone, I hung up. Silence. He was thinking. Then up comes the game broadcast again loud. I waited a minute. I called again. The sound of steps over to the receiver. Volume down. The sound of steps over to the phone. I hung up. Long silence. Then he makes a call. I hear him say, "Hey, did you just call me?" He talks for a while. Then he turns the volume up but not so loud. (This may have included a third call before he started calling others.)

2) At Howard Payne, we had at one time a Packer Hall person who monitored syllabi for correctness and conformity to accreditation policies. This person was a bit fond of asserting authority in a heavy-handedish way. To violate the syllabus code brought a stern demerit. One of the faculty had "crossed swords," so to speak, with this syllabus cop on occasion. One day, I was coming in the building, and I saw in everyone's mailbox copies of a note sent to the whole campus from the gestapo of the syllabus announcing an upcoming meeting on proper syllabus form and design. I took out the copy in the box of the other teacher who had voiced displeasure with this person and wrote at the bottom in my best imitation of Packer Hall cursive: "Make plans to attend" followed by the initials of the syllabus enforcer. Having stirred the pot, I then went upstairs, where a student waited for advising. About five minutes later, the teacher with the personalized note came angrily into my office. "Did you get one of these?" "Well, I'm advising someone right now. Just wait a minute." "Look what's written at the bottom. Look at that note. Did you get one of those?" "No, I just have the memo. Can you wait a minute?" "That's what I thought." Off the person went. A few minutes later, there was a return with a newly written letter to higher administrators complaining in blunt language over the snub. "Don't send that," I said. "Just give me a minute to finish talking to Alan here." "No, I'm going to send it." "Wait. Wait. I wrote that note at the bottom." Long pause. Long, long pause. "You got me good."

And since then, I've been really well behaved.